The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to a system for tracking crop throughout a production cycle, and in particular, to a system integrated with precision farming techniques to track a crop through all phases of the production cycle, including planting, maintenance, such as fertilizing, watering, and the like, harvesting, and delivering the crop to a processing facility.
Modern farming practices strive to increase yields of agricultural fields. Technological advances of planters allow for better agronomic characteristics at the time of planting, such as providing more accurate seed depth, improved uniformity of seed depth across the planter, and improved accuracy of in-row seed spacing. However, a single field can have performance inconsistencies between different areas. That is because a field can have a wide variety of soil types and management zones such as irrigated and non-irrigated zones in different areas. Seed companies are developing multiple varieties of each of their seed product types, with the different varieties offering improved performance characteristics for different types of soil and management zones. Efforts have been made to plant multiple varieties of a particular seed product type in different areas of fields with different soil types or management zones. These efforts include seeders with complex valves that change which stored seeds can enter a metering box. Other efforts include planters that have different hulk fill hoppers and require the reservoir for each seed meter to be completely cleaned out or planted out before a different seed variety can be delivered to the seed meters. Some planters allow for planting two varieties and include two separate and distinct seed meters at every row unit.
Still further technological advances have allowed for position-based precision farming. Agricultural vehicles have controllers included in the vehicle and vehicle location systems, such as a global position system (GPS), to monitor operation of the vehicle at the vehicle's location. Monitoring of the agricultural vehicle may, for example, record a crop being planted in a field and/or field amendments, such as fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, or water being added to the field at particular coordinates. As an agricultural vehicle such as a planter or sprayer traverses a field, the controller may record location coordinates from the GPS as well as operation of the vehicle including, for example, a product being delivered to the field, the time and date of application, and the rate at which it is being applied. The controllers may further be configured to apply product and/or field amendments at particular locations. The controller may read location coordinates from the GPS and control delivery systems on the agricultural vehicle to deliver desired product to the field at desired rates based on the coordinates.
However, operator intervention may be required and relied upon at several stages throughout the precision farming process. For example, the operator is required to enter the type of crop and, potentially, a specific variety of the crop being delivered to the field. The operator may similarly be required to enter types and varieties of field amendments being applied to the field. Further, residual product may remain in a hopper when a new product is loaded, resulting either in the old product being intermixed with the new product or having the old product be delivered first prior to application of the new product. Further, a herbicide not intended for a particular crop may be inadvertently loaded into a hopper. Although the operator may enter the intended herbicide and/or product, the incorrect herbicide may damage or kill a crop that is not tolerant of the unintended herbicide.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system to track the application of crops and field amendments being applied to fields that reduce the potential for operator error.